Pre-loading is live for Gamepass subs. Ultimate Gamepass players get in Friday.
Reviews are creeping in - open world exploration in a Gears game sounds weird, but I’m in!
Reviews are coming in, mostly positive:
Nooooooo!
Gears 5 is one of the most visually stunning games ever crafted…
After the joy and ease of Division 1 & 2’s cover and control system, I found it impossible to go backwards in time to the clunky 360-era movement mechanics that Gears 4 embraced. Has any of this been updated in Gears 5?
I played Gears 1 & 2 but never got around to 3 & 4. Is it worth playing those first? 3 would be hard for me to get a hold of and run, though I guess I could do it. 4 is free on gamepass for PC.
Or should I just skip to 5? Not exactly lacking good games to play, but I did enjoy the first 2 entries in the series. I just never got around to the rest.
I would suggest playing 4, since the new game is a direct continuation of that one. Though I thought 4 was just ok, personally.
I like that review. Captures my feelings about Gears 4 pretty well - nothing wrong with it, didn’t do anything badly, just didn’t bring anything new. I feel a bit more optimistic about 5.
I mean, the feel of the games continues to evolve, though I’ve never really heard the movement in Gears referred to as “clunky”, so YMMV.
Clunky… You know, shitty. Cumbersome. Annoying. Low quality. The worst ever. Antiquated. Half-baked.
I found lots of little games on one of my hard drives, and uninstalled them all. That was on PC. And I found lots of little games on my Xbox external SSD that I uninstalled. So I was able to pre-load the game on both systems last night.
Gears 5 is the first AAA game to get a 6/6 for deaf/hearing impaired players from caniplaythat.
An example of the detailed way they implemented some of the options:
You know how most games pair music with fighting scenes and the end of the music is how hearing players tell that scene is over and they’ve killed everything that needs killing? It’s never ever depicted to Deaf/hoh players. UNTIL NOW!
And so you see, dear reader, Gears 5 is essentially a masterclass in Deaf/hoh accessibility. Everything we’ve been harping about games lacking and therefore made more difficult for Deaf/hoh players to play has been implemented and in the 6 years I’ve been doing these reviews, damn it feels good to feel like, hey, people have been listening.
Gears 5 seems live on PC Gamepass…
These load times are pretty epic. Hopefully it’s longer than usual because it’s the first time launching the game.
Initial impressions: Pretty. The co-op elements should be fun. Major launch issues.
What little I could play, was cool. However right now there are a lot of server issues. I could not connect to a friend nor get into a party in game. We often were booted too offline status while just sitting in the main menu. Horde and Escape modes blocked me at menu saying I was not online off and on. I did eventually get a game to start, but nobody could join. Said game booted me out after a short bit saying I lost contact with the servers. Also, the pre-order content was showing for my friend, but not me. A quick search of forums and stream confirm there are dev confirmed server issues.
Besides the obvious “another paid bug hunt and semi-soft launch for developers” complaints, I was not thrilled to not even be able to play PvE content when their servers were down. Also, seeing content for sale in their store was annoying.
That said, I can see Escape mode being quite a thing. The map builder is a really cool idea and I can see this being a fun community element. We will probably want a forum topic just for GoW 5 map exchanges and challenges. Like a “who can get the best time on my map here” sort of thing. I don’t know if I would pay for skins or characters, but extra content for map building (tiles, enemies, modifiers, etc.) would definitely get my interest.
Yeah, because of the “boost” to experience, I tried several times to launch a multiplayer game. Any multiplayer game. But was unsuccessful each time. Hopefully they have those server issues sorted out before Tuesday’s launch date.
The campaign is very pretty so far. The “Previously on Gears of War” actually summarized the story pretty well so that I didn’t feel like I missed anything, and Act 1 pretty nicely laid out so far to ease the player back to this type of game.
Kind of evil that they changed the timing on the Active reload though. After playing through Gears of War Ultimate and part of Gears of War 2, I’ve gotten so used to the timing on the Lancer’s active reload, the fact that it’s completely different in this game is really throwing me off.
It’s very pretty. It performs excellently (90 fps on my computer on ultra). It has lots of options, the tutorial was good, you can notice it’s a polished product.
Let’s see if I don’t get bored as when I tried Gears 4…
If you time it right can you vault cover without taking cover first?
Yes…